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Ukraine: Oil politics
and a mockery of
democracy
By William Engdahl
The results of the third round of
elections in Ukraine in which Viktor Yushchenko
was proclaimed the final winner, far from being
grounds for jubilation in Ukraine and beyond,
ought to give concern for the future of Ukraine to
many.
The recent battle over the
election for president to succeed the pro-Moscow
Leonid Kuchma in Ukraine was more complex than
the
general Western media accounts suggest. Both
Russian President Vladimir Putin and George W Bush
are engaged in high stakes geopolitical power
plays. Both sides in Ukraine have evidently
engaged in widespread vote fraud. The Western
media chose to report only one side, however. Case
in point: a non-governmental organization, the
British Helsinki Human Rights Group, reported it
found more vote irregularities on the side of the
opposition Yushchenko in the contested November
vote, than from the pro-Moscow Viktor Yanukovych.
Yet the media reported as if fraud only took place
on the side of the pro-Moscow candidate.
The Kuchma regime was indeed
anti-democratic, and no model for human rights,
one factor which feeds an opposition movement.
Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, economic
conditions for most Ukrainians have been beyond
deplorable, providing fertile ground for any
opposition to promise better times. Yet the deeper
issue is Eurasian geopolitical control, an issue
little understood in the West.
The Ukraine
elections were not about Western-sanctioned
democratic voting, as some magic formula to open
the door to free market reform and prosperity for
Ukrainians. They were mainly about who influences
the largest neighbor of Russia, Washington or
Moscow. A dangerous power play by Washington is
involved, to put it mildly.
A look at the
geostrategic background makes things clearer.
Ukraine is historically tied to Russia,
geographically and culturally. It is Slavic, and
home of the first Russian state, Kiev Rus. Its 52
million people are the second largest population
in eastern Europe, and it is regarded as the
strategic buffer between Russia and a string of
new US North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)
bases from Poland to Bulgaria to Kosovo, all of
which have carefully been built up since the
collapse of the Soviet Union. Most important,
Ukraine is the transit land for most major Russian
Siberian gas pipelines to Germany and the rest of
Europe.
Yushchenko favors European Union
and NATO membership for Ukraine. Not surprising,
he is backed, and strongly, by Washington. Former
US national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski
has been directly involved on behalf of the Bush
administration in grooming Yushchenko for his new
role.
As far back as November 2001,
Yushchenko was reportedly wined and dined in
Washington by the Bush administration, paid for by
the US Congress-funded National Endowment for
Democracy (NED). Martin Foulner in the Glasgow
Herald of November 26 reported the details of the
meeting. NED, it's worth noting, was set up during
the Ronald Reagan administration by US Congress to
"privatize" certain Central Intelligence Agency
operations, and allow Washington to claim clean
hands in various foreign meddling. Ukraine is part
of a wider US pattern of active "regime change" in
eastern Europe and Central Asia.
Brzezinski is directly involved in Ukraine
events, and has openly condemned the initial
November election results, along with former US
secretaries of state Henry Kissinger and Colin
Powell. Brzezinski's entire career has been geared
to dismantle Russian power in Eurasia since the
time he was Jimmy Carter's National Security
Council chief. If Brzezinski succeeds in getting
his hand-picked man in power in Kiev, that will be
a major step in the direction of US domination of
all Eurasia. That, of course, is the aim, as
Brzezinski makes explicit in his writings. It is
useful to quote Brzezinski directly from his now
infamous 1997 book, The Grand Chessboard:
American Primacy and its Geostrategic
Imperatives:
Ukraine, a new and important space
on the Eurasian chessboard, is a geopolitical
pivot because its very existence as an
independent country helps to transform Russia.
Without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be a Eurasian
empire ... if Moscow regains control over
Ukraine, with its 52 million people and major
resources, as well as access to the Black Sea,
Russia automatically again regains the
wherewithal to become a powerful imperial state,
spanning Europe and Asia. The states deserving
America's strongest geopolitical support are
Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan and Ukraine, all three
being geopolitically pivotal. Indeed, Kiev's
role reinforces the argument that Ukraine is the
critical state, insofar as Russia's own future
evolution is concerned. And why
Eurasia? Brzezinski replies:
A power that dominates Eurasia would
control two of the world's three most advanced
and economically productive regions. A mere
glance at the map also suggests that control
over Eurasia would almost automatically entail
Africa's subordination, rendering the Western
hemisphere and Oceania geopolitically peripheral
to the world's central continent ... About 75%
of the world's people live in Eurasia, and most
of the world's physical wealth is there as well,
both in its enterprises and underneath its soil.
Eurasia accounts for about 60% of the world's
GNP [gross national product] and about
three-fourths of the world's known energy
resources ... Eurasia is also the location of
most of the world's politically assertive and
dynamic states. After the United States, the
next six largest economies and the next six
biggest spenders on military weaponry are
located in Eurasia. All but one of the world's
overt nuclear powers and all but one of the
covert ones are located in Eurasia. The world's
two most populous aspirants to regional hegemony
and global influence are Eurasian. All of the
potential political and/or economic challengers
to American primacy are
Eurasian. Belgrade to Kiev to
...
There is a distinct pattern of US
covert actions in changing regimes in Eastern
Europe, in the context of this Eurasian strategy
of the US, in which Ukraine fits the pattern. The
Belgrade vote in 2000 to topple Serbian Slobodan
Milosevic was organized and run by US ambassador
Richard Miles. This has been well documented by
Balkan sources and others. Significantly, the same
Miles was then sent to Georgia, where he
engineered the toppling of Eduard Shevardnadze in
favor of the US-groomed Mikhail Saakashvili last
year, another pro-NATO man on Moscow's fringe.
James Baker III played a key role as well, as some
noted at the time.
Now Miles was
reportedly involved in Kiev, with the US
ambassador there, John Herbst, former ambassador
in Uzbekistan. Curious coincidence? The Ukraine
"democratic youth" organization, Pora ("High
Time") is a slick, US-created entity. It is
modeled on the Belgrade youth group, Otpor, which
Miles also set up with help of NED and George
Soros' Open Society, USAID and similar friends.
Pora was given a brand image, for selling to the
Western media, a slick logo of a black-white
clenched fist. It even got a nifty name, the
"chestnut revolution", as in "chestnuts roasting
on an open fire".
Before he came to power,
Saakashvili was brought by Miles to Belgrade to
study the model there. In Ukraine, according to
British media and other accounts, Soros' Open
Society, the US government's NED and the Carnegie
Endowment, along with the State Department's
USAID, were all involved in fostering Ukraine
regime change. Little wonder Moscow is a bit
concerned with Washington's actions in Ukraine.
A key part of the media game has been the
claim that Yushchenko won according to "exit
polls". What is not said is that the people doing
these "exit polls" as voters left voting places
were US-trained and paid by an entity known as
Freedom House, a neo-conservative operation in
Washington. Freedom House trained some 1,000 poll
observers, who loudly declared an 11-point lead
for Yushchenko. Those claims triggered the mass
marches claiming fraud. The current head of
Freedom House is former CIA director and outspoken
neo-conservative, Admiral James Woolsey, who calls
the Bush administration's "war on terror" "World
War IV". On the Freedom House board sits none
other than Brzezinski. This would hardly seem to
be an impartial human-rights organization.
Why does Washington care so much about
vote integrity next door to Russia? Is Ukraine
democracy more important than Azeri or Uzbek
"democracy"? There is something else going on
besides what appears to be a vote count. We have
to ask why it is that the Bush administration
suddenly is so keen on the sanctity of the
democratic voting process as to risk an open break
with Moscow at this time.
Eurasian oil
geopolitics
US policy, as Brzezinski openly
stated in The Grand Chessboard, is to
Balkanize Eurasia, and ensure that no possible
stable economic or political region between
Russia, the EU and China emerges in the future
that might challenge US global hegemony. This is
the core idea of the September 2002 Bush Doctrine
of "pre-emptive wars".
In taking control
of Ukraine, Washington would take a giant step to
encircle Russia for the future. Russian moves to
use its vast energy reserves to play for room in
rebuilding its political role would be over.
Chinese efforts to link with Russia to secure some
independence from US energy control would also be
over. Iran's attempts to secure support from
Russia against US pressure would also end. Iran's
ability to enter into energy agreements with China
would also likely end. Cuba and Venezuela would
also likely fall prey to a pro-Washington regime
change soon after.
Washington policy is
aimed at direct control over the oil and gas flows
from the Caspian, including Turkmenistan, and to
counter Russian regional influence from Georgia to
Ukraine to Azerbaijan and Iran. The background
issue is Washington's unspoken recognition of the
looming exhaustion of the world's major sources of
cheap high-quality oil, the problem of global oil
depletion, or as the late American geologist M
King Hubbard termed it, of peak oil.
Over
the coming five to 10 years the world economy
faces a major new series of energy shocks as older
fields from the North Sea to Alaska to Libya and
even major fields in Saudi Arabia, such as the
giant Ghawar field, peak and begin to decline.
Many large fields already have peaked, such as the
North Sea, perhaps one reason for the British
interest in Iraq. And no new fields of a North Sea
size have been found to replace them.
It
was clearly no accident of politics that former
Halliburton chief Dick Cheney became vice
president, with quasi-presidential powers, in the
current Washington administration. Nor that his
first job was to oversee the Energy Task Force. In
late 1999, as chief executive officer of
Halliburton, Cheney delivered a speech to the
London Institute of Petroleum. Halliburton, of
course, is the world's leading oilfield services
and construction group. Cheney presumably had a
pretty good picture of where there was oil in the
world.
In his speech, Cheney presented the
picture of world oil supply and demand to fellow
oil industry people. "By some estimates," he
stated, "there will be an average of 2% annual
growth in global oil demand over the years ahead,
along with, conservatively, a 3% natural decline
in production from existing reserves." Cheney
added an alarming note: "That means by 2010 we
will need on the order of an additional 50 million
barrels a day." This is equivalent to more than
six Saudi Arabia's of today's size.
He
cited China and East Asia as fast-growth regions,
and noted that the oilfields of the Middle East
were, along with the Caspian Sea, the major
untapped oil prospects.
Oil pipeline
politics are also directly involved in the fight
for control of Ukraine. In July 2004, the Ukraine
parliament voted to open an unused oil pipeline to
transport oil from Russian Urals fields to the
port of Odessa. The Bush administration vehemently
protested this would make Ukraine more dependent
on Moscow.
The 674 kilometer oil pipeline,
completed by the Ukraine government in 2001,
between Odessa on the Black Sea and Brody in
western Ukraine, can carry up to 240,000 barrels a
day of oil. In April 2004, the Ukraine government
agreed to extend Brody to the Polish Port of
Gdansk, a move hailed in Washington and Brussels.
It would carry Caspian oil to the EU, independent
of Russia. That is, were Ukraine to become
dominated by a pro-EU pro-NATO regime in the
November vote.
The stakes were big. George
Bush Sr made a quiet trip to Kiev in May to meet
both candidates, according to the British New
Statesman of December 6. Former US secretary of
state Madelaine Albright flew in to Kiev as well.
Last July, the Kuchma government suddenly
reversed itself and voted to reverse the oil flows
in Brody-Odessa, in order to allow it to transport
Russian crude to the Black Sea.
Commenting
on the significance of that move, Ilan Berman of
the American Foreign Policy Council in Washington
remarked at the time, "Kremlin officials
understand full well that Odessa-Brody has the
potential to deal a fatal blow to Russia's current
near monopoly on Caspian energy." Berman then
added a telling note, "Worse still, from Russia's
perspective, the resulting European and US
economic attention would all but cement Kiev's
westward trajectory." The pipeline to Poland, a
three-year project, would make Poland a major new
hub for non-Russian, non-Organization of Petroleum
Exporting Countries oil as well, Berman notes.
The decision to reverse the pipeline last
July would greatly weaken that westward shift of
Ukraine. The next government will have to tackle
the issue. Ukraine is a strategic battleground in
this geopolitical tug-of-war between Washington
and Moscow. Ukrainian pipeline routes account for
75% of EU oil imports from Russia and Central
Asia, and 34% of its natural gas import. In the
near future, EU energy imports via Ukraine are set
to expand significantly with the opening of huge
oil and gas fields in Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan,
Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. Ukraine is a key
piece on Brzezinski's Eurasian chessboard, to put
it mildly, as well as Putin's.
William Engdahl is author of the
book A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil
Politics and the New World Order, recently
released by Pluto Press Ltd, London.
(Copyright William Engdahl,
2005) |
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